Precision temperature processes involve specific temperatures that must be reached and held during cooking and chilling process. It is most frequently understood as cooking at temperatures that require an extended hold time of 1 minute or more to reach a full kill of potentially hazardous pathogens. As higher cooking temperatures are reached pathogens are reduced at a faster rate until an “instant kill” temperature is reached. When cooking at lower temperatures, in order to ensure pathogens are reduced to appropriate levels, minimum hold times must be maintained. The lower the cooking temperature, the longer the minimum hold time. This time and temperature varies with the type of product cooked. This same principle applies to chilling processes, wherein there is a time and distinct temperature relationship that must be adhered to for safe food chilling.
Furthermore, industry often implements exceedingly long cook times, often in excess of 48 hours, in order to change the texture of food. Precision temperature cooking is increasingly popular, both commercially and domestically, and is often implemented via sous vide cooking, or sometimes via low temperature poaching with flavoured fat or broth. Used commercially, this culinary process currently involves manual control of cooking and chilling programs, manual food temperature monitoring with temperature loggers and probes tracking product and cooking/chilling medium temperatures and undertaking manual food safety validation. Operators must manually download and review data against time/temperature regulations set out by the local health authorities. This is time consuming and it requires expertise. Furthermore, as previously mentioned, and unrelated to safety, for culinary reasons low temperature cooking often requires different cooking temperatures in stages over an extended period of time, as well as it often involves different stages of allowable chilling temperatures over specific time periods. The temperature changes correlate to the internal temperature on the product being cooked and the desired final temperature. There is a wide range of set points and recipes used to achieve different results. The manual implementation of such processes requires great culinary and food safety expertise.
Because of the complexity of the safety validation and the difficulty of monitoring extended cook and chill times, it is advantageous to have a device that monitors internal product temperature, and validates automatically the safety of the food once the minimum hold time at a specific temperature is met. Due to the evolving understanding of the relationships between time and temperature for pathogen destruction it is advantageous to have the validation system controlled by a program that can receive instant updates. Because of the need for stage cooking and chilling based on temperature changes of the internal product temperature over an extended period of time, it is advantageous for a program to control the cooking and/or chilling device, rather than the user via manual methods.
Any discussion of the prior art throughout the specification should in no way be considered as an admission that such prior art is widely known or forms part of the common general knowledge in the field.